We are facing issue with regards to the equipment planning when assigning maintenance or preventative jobs. When we assign maintenance dates to that equipment it will generate job automatically, and our expectation is we are going to follow the assigned dates every given frequencies (for instance, assigned dates are July 20, 2020 ~ Aug 20, 2020 ~ Sept 20, 2020 ~ Oct 20, 2020 ~ etc.). The problem is if we close the generated job on July 25, 2020 the next maintenance job which is Aug 20, 2020 is changed automatically to Aug 25, 2020 , which is not acceptable by our manager.
We already checked the codes of the two screens that we used which are ‘Equipment Entry’ and ‘Maintenance Job Entry’. Equipment Entry uses Equip and EquipPlan tables and Maintenance Job Entry uses JobHead. The closed date field uses JobHead.Closeddate epibinding, and we checked already the customization codes in Equipment Entry but there’s no JobHead.Closeddate object inside. So it’s impossible to trigger the next maintenance date in Equipment Entry from the closed date in Maintenance Job Entry unless there is a built-in or epicor system default condition behind.
Is there any way to avoid or prevent these instances?
If the number of days taken to close the job card is fixed. Then you may try to use the
Buffer Days
Specifies the number of days prior to the maintenance job due date that the Maintenance Plan Processor should generate maintenance jobs for this equipment maintenance plan. For example, enter 5 if maintenance job records should be generated five days prior to their required due dates.
We have the same “issue” - but I think it’s more of a feature.
We have some boiler checks that need to be done each day. Setup a PPM job to occur daily - BUT, the Maintenance Plan Processor only creates the next instance once the prior one is closed out.
I think you can argue the functionality 2 ways, either:
A) It’s good that it does it this way, otherwise if you didn’t do the job for a week you’d still have 7 jobs to close out with a comment saying that it wasn’t done.
B) If you want to check compliance with PPM schedule, you need to write a query to look at a period of time. Take 1 year. In my example there should be 365 individual jobs - if I only have 300, then I know that 65 days were not done.
And it’s a good feature, I also explained this before to my manager about the possible pending jobs if they keep following the assigned dates.
He insists that since they put equipment plan to 30 days frequency, PPM jobs will be done surely before the assigned next maintenance date but not exactly same date with the due date.
So even if he finish the job 1 day before the next maintenance date he still don’t want to change the original assigned next maintenance date after he closed the job.
His purpose is to have a consistent timeline on their works.
Is there any way to bypass this feature?
I’ve not looked into whether it’s possible to override using a BPM. I think I checked when we started using the Maintenance functionality and didn’t find any setting that controls it in Company Config.
